John Doar, 1921-2014

Anyone who followed the Watergate saga knows that Richard Nixon, history's yard waste and a criminal president, was done in by the monotones. First, there was John Dean before the committee chaired by Sam Ervin, his voice never rising or falling, almost unnaturally without affect, a scapegoat turned lethal, explaining at length why the people in the White House needed a scapegoat in the first place. There was no anger in his presentation. Just one damning fact after another after another, over and over again. The second monotone appeared in July of 1974. It belonged to a lawyer named John Doar. It cut out Richard Nixon's heart and ate it in the marketplace.

For several weeks, the Republicans in the House of Representatives, who were seeking to pull Nixon's chestnuts out of his own self-immolating fire, were leaning on Doar, the counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, to produce his case so they could consider articles of impeachment against the president. Even Democratic members of the House were leaning on Majority Leader Tip O'Neill, who in turn was leaning on committee chairman Peter Rodino, who in turn was leaning on Doar and his staff. Knowing that, ultimately, Rodino had his back just as O'Neill had Rodino's, Doar sent word back up the chain of command to tell the Republican water-haulers and the impatient and nervous Democrats to pound sand. Doar would deliver his report when it was ready, and not before. He was not a nervous fellow, this John Doar. Long before he ever came to Congress, he had been threatened by experts.

It was Doar who had been the Department of Justice's point man during the most perilous days of the civil rights movement in the South. It was Doar who had brought the federal case against, and had secured the conviction of, the men who murdered James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and David Schwerner. It was Doar who had prosecuted the murderers of Viola Liuzzo. It was Doar who had overseen the turning of informants within the Ku Klux Klan itself. It was Doar who personally had faced down a mob in Mississippi, and who had been the point man for the Department of Justice during the voting-rights march that passed over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. He had ridden with the Freedom Riders, and had helped shepherd James Meredith through the gates of Ole Miss, when an authentic insurrection broke out there. John Doar was not going to be made nervous by some anxious congressman. When he was ready, he delivered his report, his voice never rising or falling, one fact after another, a clear line drawn from the Watergate Hotel to the Oval Office. There was no anger in his presentation. When he was finished, so was Richard Nixon.

(The best account of all of this can be found in Jimmy Breslin's marvelous Watergate book, How The Good Guys Finally Won. In it, Breslin, who refers to Doar as a terribly fierce 15-round fighter, also reminds us that Doar's life was threatened by none other than George Corley Wallace his own self, who told his cronies that somebody should take a shotgun and blow Doar's head halfway to Pensacola. As Breslin puts it, do not miss.)

Quite simply, there was no braver American amid the tumult of the 1960's and the 1970's than John Doar. Arguably, there were very few greater Americans during that same time. He made the law a shield, and then he made the law a sword, and he stood in against the most dangerous beasts in this country's heart and beat them all. He never wrote a book. He did not become the star he could have become. (Almost everyone else involved in Watergate did, god knows.) And, last Tuesday, he died, at the age of 92. When that smiling dunce, Reagan, got up at his first inaugural, and said that government was the problem, when he told that stupid Rotary Club joke about "I'm from the government and I'm here to help," I always thought about John Doar, who was from the government, and who came to help, and who did more for this country in three years down South than Reagan did in his entire sorry life. There is one thing more you should know about John Doar.

He was a Republican.

Every modern Republican should be ashamed of themselves because of that.

Charles P. PierceCharles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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